Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets such as Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography - arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit.

As the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, reflecting on the religious wars in his era, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”